Plague Rat: The Sewer Fiend

General GTG General Discussion
1

Obviously, this thread is intended for those who have played the Rook City expansion. I have been playing this for a while with a group of my friends and I finally had time to sit down and solo-play a game against Plague Rat. We’ve beaten The Chairman, Spite, and Matriarch (that’s a whole 'nother thread, let me tell you), but once I explained to my buddies that PR had no minions and instead took over heroes by infecting them, they turned tail and we went back to something from the core set.

Here’s what I set up, using the handy-dandy randomizer app found elsewhere on this forum:

Heroes: Visionary, Expatriette, and Fanatic (in that order)
Environment: Insula Primalis (a.k.a. Jurassic Park)

Things started out rough, with PR pulling a Ravage card first turn and infected both Visionary and Expatriette. Damage was already getting sprinkled out between the heroes and I hadn’t even begun a single turn yet! Opening hands for the heroes was less than perfect… Exp. managed to begin with an Unload card but no guns, Fanatic had two copies of Absolution, and Visionary had four one-shot damage cards. I swung a couple times with the first two and fanatic started doing damage (without retribution, since she wasn’t infected) to PR.

Then the environment started. Man oh man, did I wish that I had chosen a different environment. First turn and I pulled a T-Rex! Between that and the next two turns from PR, my heroes were all getting close to or under 20 HP and PR had already flipped. I have to admit, I was fearing the worst.

Within a couple of turns, I managed to use Visionary’s base power (Target player draws 2 cards, then discards 1) to cycle through Expatriette’s deck faster and get an array of weapons out. Once PR had flipped, I let Fanatic take the hit and hurt herself in order to get rid of an Infection card so that we could flip him back again next turn. Expatriette, with Sub-Machine Gun, Assault Rifle, AND Tactical Shotgun- each with at least one ammo card- used Unload to smash PR for something like 18-20 damage. I was pleased. PR was doing consistent damage, but low damage.

Finally, after two consecutive Velociraptor attacks and PR flipping and un-flipping again, Fanatic was down to 2 HP. She was infected, so on her turn I turned her down to 1 HP. You probably guessed it: Wrathful Retribution. After extending her own maximum HP earlier in-game, that one card hit PR for 30 damage even. It was a spectacular end to the game, considering my heroes were each down to less than 5 HP.

All of this to say: what is your take on Plague Rat? Do you think he’s easy or hard, or somewhere in between? I was surprised that I even beat him with only three heroes, to be honest. He had seemed so intimidating at first but his complete lack of minions to get in the way really leave him as an open target for consistent bashing, especially when I have someone like Expatriette out there. I can tell now that having Fanatic is the only reason I won, but it’s moments like that that keep me coming back to this game over and over.

2

In general, Spite and Plague Rat have seemed easier than The Chairman and The Matriarch

Being Infected turns some SotM tropes on their head – in particular the idea that having Legacy Galvanize is a good thing. But our heroes are often very adaptable. If you can find ways to minimize the damage done by the Infection (Smoke Bombs, Fortitude, etc.) then Plague Rat becomes a ‘slow’ villain, not dishing out a lot of damage every turn, so the heroes have a lot of time to come up with ways to hit him, and can focus on reducing the danger of the environment.

3

Personally I’ve found Spite to be the toughest one, unless you have Wraith on your team.

4

In the base game, Villains were always easier if you had more heroes.

In Rook City, the aim was to make Villains equally tough with 3, 4, or 5 heroes, but in practice I don’t think that’s the case. Spite is, I think, easiest with three heroes, which limits the number of ongoings the team has to lose due to a drug. Plague Rat is perhaps easiest with five, which increases the chances that an infection card will get buried and the whole team won’t be infected at the same time. Mind you, that assumes the whole team being infected is a bad thing, and I’m not entirely sure of that.

5

I like Plague Rat but his flip mechanic is unfortunately easy to deal with (unless I’m doing something wrong).
Destroying any of his infection cards after all 5 have come out (and there are so many cards which destroy ongoings) means he has a very, very long wait before he can flip to his Filthy Vermin side again, which is the more interesting side.
He would be helped by the Shadowy Ambush ongoing not being limited (play a card when you deal 5 or more damage to a single target) but he has only 1 card that deals 5 damage without buffs (Tooth and Claw x3) so it’s difficult to recycle the deck/infection cards.

Because of those points I would put him in the ‘easy’ category of Rook City Villains… but he still regularly knocks heroes down to single digit HP before we defeat him!

6

Yeah, it’s pretty trivial to keep Plague Rat from flipping.

7

At one point Plague Rat took cards from both his deck and his trash, making it nearly impossible to prevent Plague Rat from flipping.

8

I am now wondering what the effect on Plague Rat’s difficulty would be if you replaced the keyword Ongoing with a keyword like Virus on the Infection cards, thus only allowing them to be destroyed through the use of the power on Plague Rat’s Filthy Vermin side.

Time to gather the troops and test it out!

9

I guess you can keep him from flipping if you take all the damage, and have a ton of ongoing destruction on your team. I find it easier to just let him flip and then destroy all the infections with the infected hero power.

Regardless of what strategies you employ, I find plauge rat to be perfect. He’s currently the standard for me by which all other villans are judged. He’s hard, but he’s not unbeatable, his mechanics are interesting, and games against him are quite often down to the wire.

10

Well, you don’t need a “ton” of ongoing destruction. There are only five Infected cards in the deck, right? So all you need to do is destroy one or two of them, enough so that there aren’t enough left to infect all the heroes. In a four- or five-person game, that means you only have to kill one or two of them.

I like Plague Rat too, so I’m not sure why I’m arguing the point. :wink:

11

If you didn’t, I was about to! I only held off because I was working out if it was actually possible to play a 4 player game without any heroes with ongoing destruction cards, it is (Mr Fixer, Bunker, Haka, Legacy and Ra, more than I was expecting)

12

Well, I mean yeah… but plague rat has a lot of ongoings, many of which are far worse than a simple infection. Bestial Vitality, and Afflicted Frenzy come to mind. If you want to kill those and make sure you can destroy the 2 infections without resorting to the powers from the Filthy Vermin side… then yeah, IMO, you need a ton of ongoing destruction.

You’ll also in a 4 player game be taking 10 damage to all heroes on advanced mode, and 4 on regular. That seems a pretty heavy price to pay to me.

The other consideration is that it always seems like 1 hero gets infected via noxious bite or something and then Ravage comes up and infects everybody else at once. So not a whole lot of time to deal with infections if you’re intent on not letting him flip at all.

13

We’re (or at least I’m) not talking about him not flipping at all, we’re talking about being able to flip to his Filthy Vermin side more than once per game. It is almost trivial to get him to flip back to the plaguebearer side after the first flip and he doesn’t have a way to get the infection cards back unless he recycles his deck… and he has no real way to play cards quickly (5 damage is not an easy thing for him to do without buffs).

It doesn’t make him an easy villain to beat (and he’s still fun to face), it just makes it… disappointingly easy to manage his flips.

Have you had a different experience with him? Can you give me a feel of how it played out?